I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for performing handover in a wireless communication system.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These wireless systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available system resources. Examples of such multiple-access systems include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) systems, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) systems, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) systems, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) systems.
A wireless communication system may include any number of base stations that can support communication for any number of user equipments (UEs). Each base station may provide communication coverage for a particular geographic area. The overall coverage area of each base station may be partitioned into multiple (e.g., three) smaller areas. The term “cell” can refer to the smallest coverage area of a base station and/or a base station subsystem serving this coverage area.
A UE (e.g., a cellular phone) may communicate with a serving cell for a call. The UE may be mobile and may move from the coverage of the serving cell into the coverage of a new cell, which may be able to better serve the UE. The UE may perform handover from the serving cell to the new cell. The handover to the new cell may fail for various reasons. In this case, the UE may drop the connection with the serving cell and enter an idle state. The UE may then attempt to access a suitable cell in a normal manner (e.g., from scratch) in the idle state. However, having the UE enter the idle state in case of a handover failure may result in disruption of service, which may be undesirable.